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In 2022, the global economy is still shrouded in the shadow of the COVID-19 epidemic, but the semiconductor industry continues to grow.
In early August 2021, the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics Organization (WSTS) predicted that the revenue of the global semiconductor industry in 2022 would be 10.1%.

However, in early December 2021, WSTS revised the figure to 8.8 per cent, and the global semiconductor market was adjusted to $601.4 billion.
It is worth noting that the global semiconductor growth rate in 2021 is 25.6% compared with the same period last year, and the estimated growth rate in 2022 is 17 percentage points lower than that in 2021, but it still shows a positive growth trend.
At the same time, industry insiders generally agree that the trend of global semiconductor capacity shortage will run through the whole year of 2022.

TOP1-4nm process chips are commercially available in batch.

Although the complexity and cost of advanced processes below 7nm are rising sharply, this is still very important for those manufacturers who pursue the ultimate chip performance.

Because under the limitation that the semiconductor process is gradually approaching the physical limit, the chip development must be through the change of transistor architecture, back-stage packaging technology or material breakthrough and so on. in order to continuously achieve the goal of improving efficiency, reducing power consumption and reducing the size of the chip.

At the end of 2021, two top mobile phone SoC chip manufacturers, MediaTek and Qualcomm, announced the launch of flagship SoC platforms TSMC 4nm and Samsung 4nm technology-Tianji 9000 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 respectively.

This means that after this battle between the dragon and the tiger, the Android mobile camp will run into the 4nm era in 2022.
In fact, 5nm chips have been mass-produced since 2020. Huawei Qilin 9000, Qualcomm Snapdragon 888, and Apple's A14, A15 chips are all manufactured by 5nm technology.
On this basis, TSMC and Samsung are moving towards 3nm chips.

Before 3nm mass production, the 4nm process effectively filled the gap between 5nm and 3nm.
TSMC N4 process platform is based on N5 platform, the new process has been further improved in speed, power consumption and density, and is also compatible with N5 in terms of design rules, SPICE and IP, so as to achieve seamless connection between 5nm and 4nm, and form a supplement when 3nm is not mass produced.
According to previous plans, N4 will start trial production in 2021 and mass production will be achieved in 2022.
Previously, Samsung saw its 4nm process 4LPE as an evolution of its 7LPP process and added a low-power version of 4LPP, which is said to achieve a 5 per cent performance improvement and a 10 per cent reduction in power consumption compared to 4LPE. It is "the fifth-generation EUV node process that achieves the best PPAc (power, performance, area, cost) before the full-surround gate transistor (GAA) architecture" and is expected to be mass-produced in 2022.
Of course, this is the last advanced process technology for Samsung to adopt the fin field effect transistor architecture (FinFET) process, starting with the 3nm process, the company will fully adopt the GAA process.

Generally speaking, compared with the 3nm process, the 4nm process technology improved based on the 5nm process is relatively stable and mature, and the production cost is relatively low, which belongs to the transitional process, and 3nm is the focus of the relevant enterprises in the future.
But on the other hand, we have to admit that the challenges faced by advanced technology are enormous, which is why the current development trend of integrated circuit process technology is gradually developing from the single pursuit of size-dependent advanced process to the three dimensions of advanced process (More Moore), size-independent characteristic process (More than Moore) and advanced packaging.
The reasons for the endless emergence of new technologies, such as small chip (Chiplet), heterogeneous integrated system-level packaging (System-in-Package), 3D stacking and so on.